Can God’s Grace Be Resisted?
Q: If Hebrews 3:15 warns people not to harden their hearts, does this mean God’s grace can be resisted, even if some teach that grace is irresistible?
Hebrews 3:15 – While it is said: “Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
A: Yes, God’s grace can be resisted. From what I understand of the Reformed or Calvinistic doctrine of Irresistible Grace, they would say it’s not that God’s grace can’t be resisted, but that His saving grace upon a person can’t be resisted. Now, I would quibble with that, but even a Calvinist would say that there are no circumstances in which the grace of God can be resisted. They believe that when God elects and decides to move upon a person for salvation, it’s irresistible, and it’s going to happen.
I fundamentally disagree with that view. In variance with my beloved Calvinistic brethren, I don’t believe that regeneration comes before faith. I don’t think that’s how God wants us to think, even if it was true in some abstraction that regeneration happened a nanosecond before a person believed. That’s not how God wants us to think. He wants us to think, “Believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” That’s how he wants us to think, so that’s how I’m going to think.
If somebody wants me to go around thinking in theological abstractions all the time, I suppose there’s a place for that, but not a very big one. I want to live in the real world where I can tell people, “Believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.”
This relates to the Calvinist understanding of God’s sovereignty. Do we really have the ability to make choices?
Many Calvinistic apologists claim that people who don’t hold to Calvinistic doctrines don’t believe in the sovereignty of God. That’s an insult. I believe that God is absolutely sovereign, and He does things exactly how He wants to. Hypothetically, if God has conditioned some things upon man’s response, it’s because He has purposed to do it. It’s because in His sovereignty, He has decided to create a system that accomplishes God’s eternal purpose while yet allowing for the real choices of men and women. That makes God more powerful and sovereign, not less. I don’t engage in arguments about the sovereignty of God with people who take this view. My response is simply, “I don’t believe in yourdefinition of sovereignty.”
Personally, I don’t like the phrase free will. I think that a very legitimate argument can be made that the will of man, especially fallen man, is not genuinely free. To me, it comes down to this: you either need to believe that men and women have real choice or none at all. If my Calvinistic brother wants to tell me, “No, men and women do not have real choice. God just does it all as He predetermined, and that’s it,” then you believe in some kind of robotic form of humanity. We can work with that from there. But if they say, “No, however God’s sovereignty operates, it operates within a framework that allows real choices to men and women,” then we largely agree. We can dial in the details, and that’s fine.
We do not believe in sovereignty, in terms of what has been called meticulous determinism, where everything that happens is God’s directed will. We believe that people make real choices. Either humanity has real choice or it doesn’t. If humanity has real choice, then we can assign some aspect of this to mystery.
Regardless of their stance, everybody at some point appeals to mystery. My appeal to mystery comes from a slightly different place than their appeal to mystery. We all do this in some place or another, because these are things which are too great for us. That’s why our overwhelming preference is stick to the words of Scripture, and to let the Bible speak for itself. When we’re teaching through a so-called Calvinistic passage, we sound pretty Calvinistic. When we’re teaching through a so-called Arminian passage, we sound pretty Arminian. We are happy to just teach through the Bible and let it speak for itself. And the fact that we teach both types of passages gives the proper balance. Preach the Word within its larger context and let God’s truth do its thing.